A Civilized Exchange

Yes, a bit of moderation, please. Cyberspace is a community like any other and we must all learn its rules—the principal one being that of respect for each other. The marvellous thing about this blog that we’ve allowed you to join—about blogs in general—is how democratic it all is—I know I keep saying that! Everybody is their own journalist. Every opinion is of equal value. Thus, we may not all of us agree with Tom’s views here but he’s free to share whatever he wants with us. And perhaps through this open dialogue with the rest of our little community we might persuade him of his past mistakes.

Of course, this freedom has its dangers: misguided, unverified notions circulate and this can be fuel for antisocial behaviour—not excluding terrorism. Some disturbing propaganda has been written that has served to incite the more gullible among our faith groups. Now we have much to learn from the faith communities about the freedom of writing, of speech, and of publication, from their ability to balance the needs of the community over the abstract concerns of various privileged liberals. And we can learn from their passivity and reaching out to others. However, the conspiracy theories of the literati and liberati of Islington—or ‘Islamton’ as somebody wittily put it—are feeding Islamist paranoia. You don’t shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre, and you don’t shout the wrong things in cyberspace either. We hear all this talk of rights, but there is the fundamental right not to be upset; the right to be safe from fear, the right to be free from crime and antisocial behaviour.
And some of these so-called liberties are 300 years old! It’s conservatives, afraid of modernisation, with vested interests who want to resist our progressive radical ambitions to lead us into the twenty-first century. And the people who really benefit form all this are wealthy civil rights lawyers pocketing taxpayers’ money in legal aid, unproductive wranglers who grow fat on the fees from so-called human rights cases.